Open Access Publishing Fund

An open access publishing fund is a dedicated pool of money, typically administered by a university library, that pays or reimburses Article Processing Charges (APCs) on behalf of researchers at that institution who have no other funding source available to cover them. Awards are usually capped per article and per researcher, contingent on the article having no other eligible funding, and available only until the fund’s annual allocation is exhausted — distinguishing it from institutional-level Read & Publish or transformative agreements, which cover OA publishing through a negotiated publisher license rather than an individually applied-for grant.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A postdoctoral researcher with no active grant submits an accepted manuscript’s APC invoice to their university library’s OA fund; the library confirms no other funding source exists and pays the publisher directly, up to the fund’s per-article cap.

Is an instance

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries’ APC Fund publicly documents covering up to 100% of an APC, capped at $1,500 per article, for CMU-affiliated corresponding authors publishing in a qualifying fully open access journal.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

An APC paid directly from a principal investigator’s NIH or NSF grant budget line is not an OA fund award — it is direct grant-funded payment, and most OA funds explicitly exclude articles that have this option available.

Not an instance

An article published under a Read & Publish agreement is not paid through an OA fund — the publisher’s fee is settled at the institutional-license level as part of a bundled subscription-and-publishing deal, with no individual application or per-article fund draw.

An open access publishing fund (also called an OA fund, APC fund, or open access publication fund) is a dedicated pool of money — usually administered by a university library, sometimes jointly with a research office — that pays or reimburses Article Processing Charges (APCs) for researchers who have no other source of funding to cover them. It exists specifically to close the gap left when a researcher wants to publish open access but has no grant, no departmental budget line, and no publisher waiver available to pay the fee.

How an open access publishing fund works

These funds are typically capped, both in total annual budget and per-article or per-researcher award, and operate on a first-come, first-served or rolling-application basis until the year’s allocation is exhausted. A researcher (often the corresponding author) applies after acceptance — sometimes before submission — supplying the journal name, the APC amount, and confirmation that the article has no other funding source available to pay it. The library or fund administrator then pays the publisher directly or reimburses the researcher or their department.

Publicly documented examples illustrate the typical shape, though exact terms vary by institution and change over time: the University of Idaho Library’s Open Access Publishing Fund caps awards at $2,000 per article; Carnegie Mellon University Libraries’ APC Fund covers up to 100% of the fee, capped at $1,500 per article; and UC Davis Library reimburses up to $1,000 per article. Check the specific fund’s current policy rather than assuming these figures still apply.

Typical eligibility criteria

No other funding available. The near-universal condition: if a grant, department, or publisher waiver can already cover the APC, the fund won’t. Some funds explicitly exclude articles whose underlying research was grant-funded where the grant terms permit APC spending.
Institutional affiliation. At least one author, usually the corresponding author, must be affiliated with the sponsoring institution.
Fully open access venue. Most funds only pay APCs for fully OA journals or fully OA articles in hybrid journals meeting other criteria (e.g., DOAJ-listed, non-predatory, no double-dipping) — not for subscription access alone.
Per-article and per-researcher caps. A maximum dollar amount per article, and often a maximum number of articles or total dollar amount per researcher per year.
Annual budget limit. Funds commonly close to new applications once the year’s allocation runs out, regardless of an individual applicant’s eligibility.

How this differs from Read & Publish and transformative agreements

An open access publishing fund is an individual, application-based grant: a researcher applies for a specific article, and the award is capped and can run out. A Read & Publish agreement or transformative agreement is a different mechanism entirely — an institutional-level license negotiated between the library (or a consortium) and a publisher that bundles subscription access with OA publishing rights for corresponding authors at that institution, typically with no per-article application and no risk of running out mid-year for eligible authors. In practice, many libraries offer both: authors are usually directed to check first whether their target journal is covered by an existing Read & Publish deal, since that route requires no individual application, before applying to the OA fund as a fallback for journals outside any such agreement.

An OA fund is also distinct from funder-administered APC reimbursement, where the money comes from a specific grant’s own budget rather than an institutional pool, and from the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which lets a researcher comply with an open access mandate by depositing an author-accepted manuscript under a CC BY licence at no cost at all — no APC, and therefore no fund, involved.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-term="Open Access Publishing Fund"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-access-publishing-fund" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

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